Let’s pull news out of its hole

Most of what we call news is filler. The practice of filling space and time — stuffing “content” into a “news hole” — is a relic of an era when printing and broadcast space and time were limited, privately held, and paid for mostly by advertising, which requires ears and eyeballs showing up predictably and in fixed places.

The Internet obsoleted all of it, including the frame of news as filler.

There is no hole.

The river is a good metaphor for what news is, and should be. Sometimes it’s a trickle, sometimes a flood. But it always flows.

With news rivers, destinations are personal. So are many sources. Individual people are the first and best discoverers and producers of it. And also its only consumers.

They can also be customers. But no news publisher has come up with an optimal way to charge for news that works across all of them. The best they’ve come up with is their own private silos, each with paywalls and counters on them. And those all suck.

There is no centralized service that has done news right yet, and I don’t expect there to be. News is naturally distributed in both supply and demand. Some routes between the two are better than others. But they are all limited by the hole-filling frame in which they still operate.

Of all the publishing concepts we have, including publishing itself (around since Gutenberg), the one with the best leverage for the Internet is syndication. This is why RSS works so well.

I’m actually developing a tool with a group at George Mason University aimed at doing exactly that, starting with RSS, but looking to expand further, called PressForwad. Syndication, especially done with an editorial eye, a topical focus, and with a group is, I think, a major space for the news business to go.

We’re building out a tool that lives inside of WordPress, pulls in RSS, and allows groups to discuss, nominate and syndicate those posts into one river and RSS feed. A number of academic journals are working around it, as is at least one news room (I’m hoping more will as well).

@Joe – Not exactly. Those comments are for backed discussion among editors as they work through syndication feeds, nominate and draft aggregated content. They could potentially be made public too, though the code to do that isn’t included in PressForward at the moment. It’s a cool idea though, I should totally add it.